"The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire."

--

Edward Gibbon

La Triviata

Apparently, the most successful F-14 pilot ever is Jalal Zandi of the Iranian Air Force, who, during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war was reliably credited with downing nine enemy aircraft, more than any other F-14 driver in history, and he is also probably the last man to have qualified as an ace.

Getting its priorities right, in 1927 the U.S. Army refused to spend $25,000 to engage in joint coast defense maneuvers with the Navy in Narragansett Bay, but did commit $600,000 to support the Army-Navy football game.

So many refugees from Nazi Germany sold their Leica cameras to help get by, that on February 2, 1939, the North American distribution manager for the German manufacturer publicly protested that such sales were adversely affecting the company’s profits in the U.S.

It is calculated that Rome was at war for 97 of the 102 years between 343 B.C. and 241 B.C., and possibly for as many as 100.

Meeting Dr. Edmund “Comet” Halley while in England in 1698, during his famous tour of Western Europe, Peter the Great hit it off so well with the great astronomer that the two soon became riotously drunk and wheeled each other around the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in a wheel barrow.

By the beginning of 1939, German defense expenditures had reached 54-percent of the national budget, amounting to nearly 30-percent of gross domestic product.

Ernest N. Harmon, who during World War II put in a superb job commanding the 1st Armored Division in Tunisia and Italy and then the 2nd Armored Division in France, before rising to corps command, spent World War I commanding the “Provisional Squadron,” 2nd Cavalry Regiment, the only U.S. unit to see mounted action on the Western Front, conducting reconnaissance missions into no-man’s-land.

To assist in swiping secret documents from the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, in early 1941 the Office of Naval Intelligence “borrowed” a safe cracker from the California prison system.